Stories and tales I have picked up over the years,of farming in the Midlands of the United Kingdom,the house farm, and the village and all the characters that lived and worked here when I was growing up.

Wednesday, 2 July 2014

It would be around the early 1940's when we started to go to the village school , at the beginning of every new term father would reach up into the top shelf of the old cupboard and get out his hand clippers and scissors, these scissors were kept just for hair cutting and hidden away so they would not be used for cutting paper or anything else that would blunt there fine edge.

On his right hand father only had a thumb and the first two fingers and a stump of a finger, and it was with this hand that he worked the clippers and scissors to cut our hair. Those two fingers and the thumb did all the work and were much stronger than what you could imagine. Starting with the youngest one, who would be twisting his head and moving about, he would be very careful and go steady, but when it came to the forth and last one sometimes his patience would be wearing a bit thin, the clippers would be pushed up the back of ya neck faster than he was clipping and that would pull ya hair out by the root

When using the scissors, he would start snapping the scissors at a tremendous rate (or so it seemed to us kids) in mi air, then run the comb up the the back of ya neck n over ya yed, as if he were doing a practice run, then on the second run lower the scissors into work on top of the comb, working over the top and the all round the back, with hair flying all over the place.Many folk likened it to his skills at thatching the corn ricks and shearing the sheep, swift and most of the time accurate, he would nick ya earole if ya dinna sit still.